Many of us who care and are paying attention to the current reign of evil and terror in America are finding it hard to stay on the path of hope.
When we see little children being used as pawns by armed, masked goons seeking to increase their daily quota for catching Black and brown people whether or not they are citizens or undocumented, our hearts break. Then we add to that a president who is completely out of control and if he were a Democrat the Republicans would have made every effort possible to remove him from office.
Catherine Meeks
But instead, he is allowed to ruin our relationships with allies, threaten to attack an ally, order people to be murdered in the Caribbean, attack and remove the leader of Venezuela for less than honorable reasons, refuse to work to provide health care for millions of Americans, support cutting SNAP, USAID and many education services that benefit hardworking and oftentimes struggling Americans. And along with all of this, he wages revenge campaigns against folks who speak against him, stand up to him or find ways to force him to quit bullying them. And he continues to participate in the Epstein coverup for some reason.
It is difficult to see all this and stay the course toward hope and the deep belief that all this is going someplace that ultimately will make the United States a better place. But we must stay the course and continue to remain on the side of hope while declaring that despair is not one of the choices we have.
“We cannot allow a bully to dictate who we will be and how we will act.”
We cannot allow a bully to dictate who we will be and how we will act. We cannot stop believing this time is the right time for us as a nation and we are being given an opportunity to reimagine ourselves and become a better nation than we were prior to Donald Trump.
If we fall into the trap of despair, we cease to have the power to engage this moment and make use of the opportunity being provided to us by the energy of disruption we are experiencing.
In our better moments, we know great change does not occur without great disruption in our individual lives as well as our collective lives. Thus, on the one hand while we are enraged by all the pain being caused by this regime — which is totally fueled by greed, power grabbing, amorality and fear mongering — we can affirm there is more to the story than that. We can affirm this much strife has a deeper meaning we can seek to find and engage it.
This process will save us from despair. When one chooses to stand in the midst of this type of disruption without allowing it to destabilize their inner resolve to resist and create a new narrative, the energy needed to do that will emerge and the temptation to despair will be reduced.
One of the tools of this regime’s type of evil is to create a sense of helplessness through violence, fear and chaos. But when that is met with hope, resistance and an inner commitment to change the narrative through reinvention, things can begin to shift.
The United States needed to change. Trump did not invent the problems we now see so much clearer since his reign of terror began. The problems of racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, runaway materialism, militarism and collective greed, abuses of power and bad political leaders existed before Trump came on the political scene. We needed to change, but we managed to delude ourselves as a nation into thinking we were the greatest nation on the planet and our military and economic power were the only thing we needed.
“Trump did not invent the problems we now see so much clearer since his reign of terror began.”
Now we know better. We have much work to do that we needed to do before Trump, and standing up in this moment is a step in the direction of taking the work ahead seriously.
We can do better than we have done. We can be a place where everyone is seen as a valued child of the Creator who deserves the best life possible. We can be a place that seeks peace and is truly committed to life without violence. The possibility to create a new world for ourselves is being presented to us and in order to say “yes” to the invitations we have to avoid despair and reaffirm our intention to become the country we claimed ourselves to be even though it was not true.
We can be better than we were. It is up to each one of us to decide how we will engage this present moment. May we find the courage to choose hope and resistance instead of despair.
Catherine Meeks was given the President Joseph R. Biden Lifetime Achievement and Service Award in August 2022; was listed by Georgia Trend Magazine as one of the 500 women to watch in Georgia in 2022; retired as the Clara Carter Acree Distinguished Professor of Socio-Cultural Studies at Mercer University; is a community and wellness activist and midwife to the soul; and the author of The Night Is Long, But Light Comes In The Morning, Meditations on Racial Healing, She previously served as founding executive director of Absalom Jones Episcopal Center for Racial Healing and currently serves as founder and executive director of the Turquoise and Lavender Institute for Transformation and Healing. She lives in Atlanta.